Adams and Jefferson Vilify Trump's Perversion of the Alien Enemies Act

Mr. Trump,

I address you not in deference to your office, which you have defiled beyond recognition, but in service to the Republic, which you daily imperil with your reckless and lawless conduct. Your invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is an affront to both history and justice. That law, born of legitimate fears during the Quasi-War with France, was intended as a temporary measure to protect the fledgling Republic from spies and hostile foreign agents in the event of open conflict. It was never meant to grant unchecked authority to a president in peacetime, and certainly not to serve as a vehicle for political vendettas. Unlike that moment in history, however, your eager and inappropriate use of it is not born of necessity but of naked political ambition, a perversion of its original intent.? Moreover, your defiance of a federal court order is something far graver—a declaration that you view yourself as above the law, a despot rather than an executive.?

The Alien Enemies Act was never meant to serve as the personal cudgel of an unprincipled ruler seeking to bypass the legal constraints of a free government. It was drafted to protect the young Republic from foreign threats in times of declared war, not to serve the whims of a man who mistakes savagery for strength and vengeance for governance.

You have wielded a statute conceived in wartime necessity as a blunt instrument of your own political ambition, twisting its intent beyond all recognition. When my administration enforced this law, it was reluctantly and under the shadow of imminent war, with our sailors seized by a foreign power and our nation on the brink of invasion. Even then, its application was measured and temporary. Your invocation of this statute, in a time of no declared war, against individuals not representing a foreign enemy power, is an insult to the principles of justice and the careful limitations placed upon executive power.

But even this perversion pales before your latest crime—the deliberate defiance of the judiciary. Judge Boasberg issued a clear and lawful order. You ignored it. Planes carrying deportees were commanded to turn back, yet under your direction, they continued on their course and others took off. In your defiance, you have declared war not upon gangs or criminals, but upon the Constitution itself. As Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 78, "the complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution."

You are not the first man to lust for unchecked power, nor will you be the last. But history records with merciless clarity the fate of those who mistake themselves for kings in a nation of laws. No amount of flag-waving, demagoguery, or contempt for judicial authority will shield you from the judgment of posterity—or, indeed, from the laws you so brazenly defy.

Consider carefully the path you have chosen, for it is one that ends only in disgrace. The Republic will endure, though you do everything in your power to weaken it. The law will prevail, though you trample upon it. And history will remember you, not as a leader, but as a criminal, an aberration, a warning to all who might follow in your wretched footsteps.

Desist from this lawlessness while you still can. The Constitution is not yours to dismantle. The Republic is not yours to break. The law is not yours to ignore.

John Adams

Mr. Trump,

There are tyrants who seize power with fire and sword, and then there are those who debase it with cowardice, lawlessness, and deceit. You are of the latter kind. You lack even the conviction of the despots of history; yours is a tyranny of impulse, of vanity, of a man so consumed by his own whims that he tramples upon the sacred institutions of the Republic not with purpose, but with reckless abandon. Your every action drags the nation closer to the precipice of despotism, yet unlike those who came before you, you wield your office not with strategy, but with petulance and self-interest, blind to the consequences of your own lawlessness. Your invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute whose very origins I opposed as a blight upon the liberties of a free people, now serves as a cudgel in your grasp—not to defend the nation in a time of war, but to empower your personal despotism in a time of peace.

The history of that law is one of caution, of an overreach born in fear of foreign subversion. I stood against it then, and I stand against its perversion now. Where John Adams himself sought to enforce it with reluctance, you wield it with zeal, stretching its meaning beyond reason, beyond legality, beyond morality. This is not the act of a president bound by the Constitution but of a tyrant bound by nothing save his own will.

Yet your defiance does not end there. Your contempt for the judiciary—defying Judge Boasberg’s lawful order, allowing planes to depart in direct contradiction of the court’s ruling—is not merely an affront to the dignity of the bench. It is an act of war against the very structure of our government. You have declared, by deed if not by word, that you recognize no check upon your power, no restraint upon your hand, no authority save your own.

Let me be unequivocal: these are not merely the acts of a despot, but of the most craven and least principled among them—one who tests the limits of tyranny only to find that the judiciary will not yield. I have seen men of ambition, men of vanity, men of arrogance, but few have matched your contempt for law itself. And yet, for all your bluster, the Republic will endure. The Constitution will outlast you. The law, though bruised by your abuses, will not break. And history will not be kind to your memory.

Desist, if there remains in you any remnant of conscience. But if you persist, know that the fate of all who have sought to rule as kings in a land of laws awaits you: disgrace, condemnation, and the unyielding judgment of a free people who shall not be so easily subdued.

Thomas Jefferson